Cultura Voice

Deezer has launched a new website and social media campaign to publicly champion a user-centric payment system (UCPS) and is planning to launch a pilot in France early next year – if it can get rightsholders onboard. Speaking to journalists at a briefing in Paris last week, the company said that it has a “technical solution in place”, the implementation of which “does not require significant investment” and is now in talks with rightsholders and French policy makers to rally support for the new system. Music companies that support Deezer’s UCPS proposal so far include Because Music, Wagram Music, Play Two, Idol, Tot ou tard, Outhere Music, #NP, Believe Distribution Services, Six et Sept, International Artist Organization of Music, FELIN, UPFI, MMF France and GAM. Over 40 labels globally have agreed to Deezer’s UCPS, including the majority of French labels, but there are notable major absentees from the list of partners shared by the company. Deezer, which has 14 milli...

The news that Scoot Borchetta’s Big Machine Label Group was being sold to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings for circa $300m has caused some major fallout. In response to the news, Taylor Swift – whose first six studio albums are owned by BMLG – penned an open letter in which she claimed that the sale of her masters to Braun was beyond her “worst nightmares”. Swift suggested that she learned about the BMLG buyout “as it was announced to the world”, despite her father, Scott Swift, being a minority shareholder in Big Machine. (He is thought to own 4% of the company now being sold to Braun.) In addition, Swift claimed that, despite having “pleaded” with Borchetta to take ownership of her masters, the closest she came was a contract renewal offer from Big Machine which would have enabled her to “earn” back the rights to her albums one-by-one. She rejected this offer, she says, in favor of her new deal with Universal Music Group. Swift claimed: “[I]  wa...

This quote didn’t come from a particular friend of music. It’s from Margaret Thatcher — the free-market-loving British prime minister (1979-1990) who happened to authorize some of the severest cuts in arts funding the UK has ever seen. Still, the point stands. And if you needed further evidence to back it up, the modern music industry has just provided it in abundance. On June 20th, a powerful group of industry organizations — including the three major labels plus publishing groups owned by Universal, Sony and Warner —  inked a “Code of Best Practice”  designed to tackle the blight of “fake streams” in the modern music business. Fake streams, in a nutshell, cover any instance — whether for monetary or industry/charting benefit — whereby one party pays another party to rack up illegitimate plays of an artist’s music. This is often achieved via bots or “stream farms,” where banks of devices all running services like Spotify continually play the music of the paying party...